Canada Walmart Warehouse Unionizes
By 
Eight hundred workers near Toronto have won the first Walmart warehouse union in Canada or the U.S.
“Honestly I was pretty nervous at first because I didn’t want to lose my job,” said 29-year employee Rodolfo Pilozo, a member of “Team Red,” the organizing committee behind the September victory.
The Walmart distribution center is in Mississauga, Ontario, an hour from the western New York border. Workers there began organizing last December to join Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union.
Forty percent signed union cards over the summer. Pilozo cited low wages and pressure to work dangerously fast as the main concerns that pushed him and his co-workers to organize.
The retail giant Walmart is not only the biggest private employer in the U.S., but also the biggest in the world. In Canada it has 400 stores and 100,000 workers.
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To protect its organizing committee, the union deployed an unconventional tactic: telling the company who was on it.
Unifor sent “protection letters” to Walmart, informing the company that a worker committee was active at the warehouse, naming many of its members, and stating that the union wouldn’t hesitate to file unfair labor practice charges if Walmart violated their rights.
Under Canadian labor law, a union may be automatically certified if the employer is found to have violated labor rights during the organizing campaign — for instance, by harassing worker-organizers or preventing them from talking about the union during non-work hours. This is similar to the precedent set last year in the U.S. under the National Labor Relations Board’s Cemex decision.
In Ontario, the union found the letters helped to get management to back off.
That isn’t to say Walmart ignored the union drive. The company put out its own messages to discourage people from voting yes — including, Pilozo said, hanging up a banner that told workers they could still vote no even if they had signed a union card requesting the election.
Walmart is notoriously anti-union — famous, among other things, for maintaining a special hotline for managers to call at the first inkling of union activity.
In the past, when workers in Quebec managed to organize a union at two stores, the company closed the stores, despite Canadian laws that make this illegal. In the U.S., two weeks after meat cutters at a Texas Walmart voted to unionize in 2000, the company announced it was eliminating its meat cutting department in Texas and five other states.
I wonder how far Walmart would go to get rid of this union. They do have unions in Chile at least, though the context of Chilean unionism is extremely different. I guess we will find out.